Hoda El Shakry
On 23 May, members of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza organized a graduation ceremony for students, faculty, staff, family, and community members. After the event, we all gathered over a shared meal to celebrate everything that these students had built and all that they would be. It was a profoundly moving evening that honored the abundance, joy, and resilience of this unstoppable movement for Palestinian liberation.
The following day, a handful of graduating students who had been vocal members of the UChicago Popular University received an ominous email from the Associate Dean of Students indicating that the university was investigating numerous reports of “disruptive conduct” during the encampment in which these students had been “identified” for their involvement. Sidestepping faculty governance protocols and standard procedures, administrators weaponized the Disciplinary System for Disruptive Conduct and informed students that their degrees would not be conferred until the charges were resolved.
In less than twenty-four hours, we were faced with the stark contrast between a punitive university culture of policing dissent and a popular university built on communities of care and a commitment to the freedom of all.
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The UChicago Popular University for Gaza was established on the morning of 29 April by UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) as part of a wave of Palestine Solidarity Encampments forming on university campuses to protest the devastation in Gaza that is part of the ongoing Nakba. The students’ demand to “divest, disclose, repair” calls out the financial, military, and ideological support of Israel’s targeted destruction of Palestinian lives, lands, and infrastructure by both the US government and our own universities. The encampment was raided and dismantled by the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) at 4:25 a.m. on Monday 7 May using terrorizing tactics that expose the colonial origins of the UChicago police.
Palestine Solidarity Encampments are indexing historic student-led anti-war and anti-colonial organizing—from protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s to calls to divest from South Africa’s Apartheid regime in the 1980s. They are also exposing the limitations of liberal models of free speech and international governance in relation to the Palestine Exception. Scholars and activists have long noted the Palestine Exception to free speech, which has essentially imposed a de facto gag order on speech advocating for Palestine through silencing measures—ranging from False and Inflammatory Accusations of Antisemitism and Support for Terrorism, Official Denunciations, Bureaucratic Barriers, Cancellations and Alterations of Academic and Cultural Events, Threats to Academic Freedom, Lawsuits and Legal Threats, to Legislation—according to a recent report from Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Steven Salaita, who had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign because of his vocal views on Palestine, has advocated for reframing the moniker Progressive except for Palestine (or PEP) as Regressive because of Israel (or RBI) to indicate the incompatibility of progressive politics with Zionism as a “settler-colonial movement” premised on “Palestinian dispossession and occupation.”
While we might find resonances between the 1960s, 1980s, and today—from revolutionary student-led calls to collective action to the brutal police crackdowns ordered by university presidents—the Palestine Exception adds a unique dimension to our current moment. Even if institutions of higher learning continue to be on the wrong side of history, Palestine Solidarity Encampments have called out the administrative double-speak and chilling climate of New McCarthyism suppressing speech about Palestine across university campuses in the US and Europe. Worse still, this is happening as taxes, tuitions, and endowments are funding, and often profiting from, investment in Israeli tech, telecom, and weapons industries that support the current assault on Gaza and ongoing occupation of Palestine. For context, UChicago’s university investment board was recently rated 0/40 by Amnesty International for failure to ensure that its investments are in accordance with the UN’s Guiding Principles of Human Rights.
Prior to the encampment, the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) coalition staged a peaceful action on 9 November consisting of a sit-in of Rosenwald Hall during which they called for: a public meeting with university administration and President Paul Alivisatos, transparency in university investments, and full divestment from weapons manufacturers supplying the Israeli military. The university responded by locking down Rosenwald and adjacent buildings, barring NLG legal observers and press, in addition to authorizing the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) to arrest all participating students and faculty observers who remained in the building. UCPD ultimately arrested twenty-six students and two faculty members on grounds of “criminal trespass to real property,” which is typically a Class B misdemeanor in the state of Illinois, that can carry a punishment of up to six months in jail and a 1,500 dollar fine. Despite significant pressure from the university community, the administration refused to humor any of the students’ demands or drop the charges, which the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office independently declined to pursue. Nearly seven months later, arrested students are only just learning the results of specious disciplinary hearings that they underwent in response to an internal complaint by university administrators for alleged violation of Statute 21 on “disruptive conduct.”
Despite thispolicing of dissent, student organizers have led the effort to amplify the Palestinian plight for survival and sovereignty, while simultaneously pushing for the university administration to cease material support for the current war and acknowledge its most vulnerable victims. An essential part of this process is the institutional recognition of what Palestinian scholars refer to as scholasticide—a term first coined in 2009 by Karma Nabulsi to name “the systematic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure”. Within six months, the current war on Gaza has accelerated the project of scholasticide with the destruction of over 80 percent of Gaza’s schools, including the reduction of every single one of Gaza’s twelve universities to rubble, and the killing of countless students, teachers, and professors. Leaving hundreds of thousands of students with no access to education, there has been the further destruction of revered spaces of knowledge production and learning—such as libraries, archives, heritage sites, mosques, and churches.
The University of Chicago’s continued silence on the destruction of Palestinian higher education was a major sticking point during the failed negotiations with UCUP representatives. This epistemic violence only grew as university administrators abruptly ended negotiations after a session on 5 May, that I attended, during which student organizers pressed them for greater clarity and accountability measures. By virtue of rhetorical gymnastics, the document outlining proposed university commitments offered in exchange for ending the student encampment managed to avoid mentioning the words Palestine or Palestinian even once. The student demands demonstrated not only principled moral clarity but also a highly knowledgeable understanding of the political intricacies of the current war in Gaza, as well as the internal contradictions of UChicago’s policies on free speech and political neutrality. In so doing, they tapped into the one of the fundamental questions at the heart of the current divestment movement—whether in the context of weapons manufacturing, genocide, or fossil fuels—namely, how can investment be politically neutral but divestment be politically charged? Put otherwise, Is the premise of “profit at all costs” itself not deeply political?
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Students have actively challenged this growing cognitive dissonance between, on the one hand, the unfiltered images of death and detritus emerging from the brave Gazan journalists fearlessly bearing witness to their own existential and material displacement and, on the other, US institutional whitewashing of this unfolding genocide. From daily rallies, vigils, art builds, fundraising, and sit-ins to the recent encampment, they have built a space for collective mourning and mobilization at a moment when Palestinians are being represented as nonhuman in life and ungrievable in death.
UChicago’s Popular University forGaza was comprised of hundreds of tents on the quad that included sleeping quarters, a welcome tent, food tent, medical tent, media tent, and public library named after the Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer—killed by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza on 6 December—among numerous other resources and events that centered intersectional solidarity, collective organizing, and mutual aid. Daily programming included a diverse range of student, community, and faculty-led teach-ins—on Palestine, Israeli settlers, and Jewish anti-Zionism; on the history of protest movements from the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square to the 1968 student protests, and Occupy movement—as well as workshops, interfaith services, and cultural events.
The encampment invoked powerful sites of revolutionary action staged across the Middle East and North Africa in recent memory—from the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square to the Hirak or 17 October Revolution in Beirut in 2019. Student encampment tents also honored the resilient itineracy of the Palestinian people—with nearly 1.5 million Palestinians living in refugee camps prior to 7 October and roughly half of Palestinians, over seven million people, comprising one of the largest diasporic communities in the world.
The recent fixation on the “disruptive” nature of student protests and encampments fails to account for the fact that war and genocide are profoundly disruptive. By critically engaging with the disturbing realities of our present moment, students and their allies have been moved to change business as usual—as threating as that might seem to the political old guard or the ivory towers of the academy. Our student-led movements and encampments have ignited a revolutionary imaginary that rejects the normalization of the unfolding horrors in Gaza as well as the weaponization of free speech and institutional neutrality policies. This politics of refusal, embodied by the popular protest chant “shut it down” speaks to a growing public awareness about the multiple ways in which Palestinian oppression intersects with broader struggles for social justice—both on and off campus.
As an anti-colonial project, the scholarly, existential, and social movement for Palestinian sovereignty exceeds false binaries of philosophy and praxis as well as the personal and the political. In the words of Sherene Seikaly, “Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present.” It implicates the necropolitics of settler colonialism and genocide, the cryptopolitics of war, extractive economies of capital, the carceral state, workers movements and labor rights, as well as the biopolitical forces that seek to discipline unruly bodies. There is no unseeing these difficult truths nor how profoundly they reverberate on our campuses. As some of my colleagues have recently pointed out, the students are merely reflecting back to us precisely how undemocratic the university really is.
Inspired by our student organizers, a UChicago Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter was formalized on 4 December, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, advocating for Palestinian liberation, and supporting students and others protesting for Palestinian rights. Our chapter of nearly two hundred faculty and staff serves as “a political base from which to fight for the liberation of the Palestinian people as well as for broader, intersecting matters of justice,” which we understand as “aligned with anti-colonial movements and struggles in many parts of the world. These include movements for indigenous land rights, Black liberation, gender and sexual freedom, disability justice, and a liveable and sustainable planet”. Our principles of unity follow urgent calls from Palestinian civil society to join the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli institutions for their material and ideological support of the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestine.
By restructuring what education can be, the UChicago Popular University for Gaza bravely charted a path towards another horizon of possibility. Experiencing this student-led movement has renewed my sense of the radical power of imagining the world otherwise. It has also shown that the seemingly impossible—whether an abolitionist university or a liberated Palestine—is a highly moveable target. As Palestinian scholar Samera Esmeir so eloquently urges us:
Hoda El Shakry is a member of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza and Faculty for Justice in Palestine. An assistant professor of comparative literature, she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural production from North Africa and the Middle East, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Her first book, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (2020) was awarded the 2020 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. Her current research explores Arab print cultures, anti-colonial theory, speculative fiction, and Palestinian world-building.
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